Most years, I teach an introductory course on International Trade Law. And every year since I began I’ve included a session on the international financial architecture, on the view that this architecture is intimately bound up with the functioning of the trade regime.

I begin the course predictably enough with a series of sessions on the history and political economy of international trade before we get into what I call the “guts of the GATT.” Here, we study the key articles of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the main disputes that have arisen concerning their interpretation, both before and after the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Any course on international trade law would have to introduce core elements such as “most favored nation” status (Art. I), “national treatment” (Art. III), key exceptions (for example, as elaborated in Article XX), and the main “annex agreements” of the WTO (such as the TRIPS agreement, which Amy Kapczynski has discussed on this blog), as well as the various remedies and safeguards available to states facing disruptions from international trade. But toward the end of the course, I bring my friend and colleague, Robert Hockett, to discuss the international financial architecture underpinning economic globalization as a whole.

I suspect few international trade law courses address international finance as an integral part of an introduction to trade liberalization. Given the evolution of international economic law, this choice is probably unsurprising. Neither in the treaty text of the GATT (nor in the other “annex agreements” that make up the WTO) is financial architecture explicitly regulated. By contrast with international trade law, international financial law is elaborated through a different set of governing texts, institutions, and international monetary practices—prominently, the IMF Articles of Agreement, the IMF itself, and the practices that have developed among affiliated national central banks and finance ministries. Trade law scholars may be understandably wary of bringing such complex or seemingly extraneous considerations into a course that will already be full enough.

In the early weeks of the Trump presidency, Steve Bannon declared that one of its principal tasks would be the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Though Bannon has since left the White House, this project has so far proved one of its most enduring preoccupations. Administrative bodies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, Departments of Health and Human Services, Justice, and Education, and Federal Communications Commission have reversed course on key progressive initiatives such as reductions in carbon emissions, healthcare insurance enrollment, police reform, redress of campus sexual harassment and assault, and net neutrality.

The tenured civil service is being sidelined, or even targeted by opposition research firms hired by their own departments. The recently enacted tax bill promises to starve the government of the resources to sustain the remaining pillars of the welfare state, namely Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. And the appointment of Justice Gorsuch to the Supreme Court casts doubt on the future of a core principle of administrative law—that courts should defer to agencies’ reasonable interpretations of statutory ambiguities.

This effort to rein-in the regulatory state has been at the center of the conservative agenda since the 1930s, and ascendant since Reagan. It overlaps with a broader neoliberal policy framework that many centrist Democrats share, which remains skeptical of the public provision of goods and services, and “command-and-control” regulation. Bill Clinton’s bipartisan mantra that “the era of big government is over” has steadily eroded regulatory and welfare institutions, and fulfilled its own prophecy that bureaucrats are incapable of promoting the public good.

As we near the pinnacle of this era of governance, Bannon’s declaration throws into relief a constituent feature of any viable counter-movement. If we are to develop a political program capable of rescuing the American polity from private domination, economic inequality, and caste hierarchy, we must think through what kind of administrative apparatus could carry that program into action. One that sees its role primarily as correcting market failures, “nudging” individuals to make decisions the expert deems wise, and maximizing aggregate social welfare, is likely to simply reproduce the logic of private enterprise within government.

The hegemonic framework for policy reasoning today—cost-benefit analysis—attempts to approximate market pricing where it does not exist, asking, for example, how much people are “willing to pay” to avoid certain kinds of harms. Such methods can be useful in ensuring that decision-makers fully take into account the economic effects of proposed courses of action. But they instill a regulatory ideology where the model of formally free, reciprocal, and competitive exchange predominates over the practice of joint action motivated by a common aim. We come to approach even political rights and obligations as priced commodities rather than as products of either reasoned agreement or social struggle. Instead of a cost-benefit state, we need a state that simulates an egalitarian society and stimulates a democratic politics.

As David, Amy, and Jed note in their opening post, the economic, social, political, and ecological crises of the current moment are helping fuel an exciting wave of legal scholarship. This emerging trend, the “law and political economy” (LPE) approach, interrogates the relationships between law, politics, and economics, exploring issues of power, inequality, democracy, and social change. As we explore what this approach might mean and what its implications might be, it is important to situate these inquiries in a larger history of legal scholarship and reform politics. This is not the first time that a similar moment of crisis has helped spur creative new thinking about the relationships between law, capitalism, and democracy—and it won’t be the last. In this post, I want to sketch a particular aspect of this trajectory: the long legacy of legal realism and its relationship to our current debates around law and political economy.

This legacy is important for two reasons. First, now, as then, we face a similar period of socioeconomic upheaval and political conflict, prompting us to rethink our legal structures. As a result, the substantive insights of legal realism remain valuable for an LPE approach today. Second, recalling the trajectory of legal realism and its successor intellectual movements is helpful in highlighting the kinds of tensions and questions that an LPE approach will have to continue to address.

Neoliberalism is an indispensable term for making sense of the legal, political, and ideological conflicts of the moment, and also one of the most maligned. Liberals who feel criticized by it have insisted so often and so loudly on its uselessness that even those on the left who use it often seem compelled to apologize as they do so, to distance themselves from all its other uses and users. People thus use the term in the very conditions it should work to criticize: isolated, idiosyncratic, mutually mistrustful, and “entrepreneurial.”

The term matters because it names key strategies in one of the major conflicts of the time: the struggle between democratic claims on economic life, usually on behalf of the security and autonomy of workers and other “ordinary” people, and the claims of capital and management: for higher profit, greater capital mobility, the subjection of non-market practices to market logic (from childrearing to universities to the professions), and “freedom to manage” through “labor flexibility.” To use the term, in the early twenty-first century, is generally to acknowledge the lines of this conflict, and often to take sides. For this reason, it is often discomforting to anyone whose view of the social and legal worlds is fundamentally conciliatory – Make the pie bigger through overall efficiency! – or organized by a different division, such as good Democrats versus wicked Republicans, or responsible conservatives versus heedless liberals.

If you are looking to identify neoliberal forms of argument, look first for four overlapping kinds of claims. The first and simplest is an efficiency-based view, sometimes called (by its critics) “market fundamentalism,” holding that strong property rights and private contracting are the best means to increase overall welfare, and that law should promote these except when it intervenes to “correct market failures.” Second is a more explicitly moral line of argument (though of course promoting overall welfare is an intensely moral project) that property and markets best protect the freedom and dignity of individuals, so a market society is the most decent social order possible. The third line of argument adopts a tragic register to deny that democratic politics and public institutions can ever successfully discipline and shape economic life. This pessimistic position tends to serve as a backstop when it is clear that market arrangements are failing to deliver overall welfare – because of intermittent crises and runaway inequality, let us say. “That may be so,” the neoliberal argument now runs, “but the alternatives are always worse – corruption, abuse of power, utopian tyrannies.” The last line of argument is the subtlest, often implicit, and also often the most important: the exclusion of certain kinds of ideas and proposals from any place at the table.Continue reading →

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